December 26, 2025: Christmas Greetings From the President

Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.” (...)

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dem[ocrat]s are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:
Image: none, too disgusted

[ed. It's called Illeism (to talk about yourself in the third person):]

In the realm of clinical psychology, illeism takes on a whole new dimension. It’s been observed in certain personality disorders and mental health conditions, sometimes as a coping mechanism or a symptom of dissociation.

***

[ed. Also this: Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us (Guardian):]

The US had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when the US had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights – not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Ronald Reagan, the US went off the rails: deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all, stock buy-backs and the wellbeing of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republicans, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of the US.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of the US. They are out for themselves.

The “fucking nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders”, realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

The Precipice

May 1991. Mumbai. Night.

While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.

Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.

Between May 21 and 31, four flights carried India’s treasure out of the country: 20 tonnes to UBS in Switzerland, 47 tonnes to the Bank of England in London. The RBI had to charter something called “Heavy Lift Cargo Airlines” because nobody else would touch this operation.

The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.

If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.

And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.

When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”

The operation raised $600 million.

It bought India about three weeks.

Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.

What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?

We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.

The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of

Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.

Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.

Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.

That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.

The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history. (...)

Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.

And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.

Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.

The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.

India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.

And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.

You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.

This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.

by Samir Varna |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

North Pole Economics

Or, how the Grinch stole Christmas. Again.

Earlier this year, toy makers said tariffs would put Christmas "at risk." NPR's A Martinez gets an update on the price of toys from Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

We have a follow-up conversation about the price of toys. During the summer, a toy industry group warned that the president's Liberation Day tariffs would put Christmas at risk. Well, the holidays are now upon us, so we've called back Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun! That's the home of Care Bears, Tonka trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite. Jay, so it might sound like we are completely obsessed with the price of a classic steel Tonka truck, but I got to ask again - what is it going to cost this year?

JAY FOREMAN: Well, this year, it's going to cost about 40 bucks, given the tariffs and general inflation. Last year, it was 30 bucks, and the year before, it was 25. So things are really accelerating in the toy space.

MARTÍNEZ: And these price hikes - what does that do to your sales? Are Tonka trucks so classic that people are just going to buy them anyway, or are you seeing a slowdown?

FOREMAN: Well, we're seeing sort of two different effects. The first effect was that we lost about eight weeks of shipping in the middle of the season, as well as this sort of uncertainty about what the tariff level would be sort of stunted the traditional pattern of buying from the retailers. So we got a lot less orders this year than last year. So whether the consumer shows up or not, there are going to be less Tonka trucks in the market. The other aspect, of course, is the consumer sentiment. We are really now starting to feel the consumer is noticing that prices are up and affordability is becoming an issue.

MARTÍNEZ: So I was looking at a report from the market research group Circana, and they say U.S. toy sales have been up by 7% this year. How do we square what they say and what you're reporting?

FOREMAN: So there's really two factors there. One is if you increase the price of toys anywhere from 10% to 30% because you've got a 30% tariff, then your gross sales are going to go up regardless. But the other thing that's skewing the sales data is there's a huge trend right now in the toy business, which is collectible trading cards, which aren't really toys. They're as much as a publishing item as they are toys, but they're sort of tracked by Circana in toys. And things like Pokemon cards, NBA cards, Major League Baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering trading cards - they're on fire right now. And the toy industry might be seeing some increase in sales, but it's in a very narrow band of categories and with a small group of companies. The smaller or medium-sized companies are really hurting pretty bad this year over the tariffs.

MARTÍNEZ: The last time we spoke, too, we talked about maybe considering where you manufacture things. Has enough time passed for you to make some kind of call, or maybe at least be leaning in a certain direction when it comes to where you manufacture your toys?

FOREMAN: Yeah. I mean, we held fast here at Basic Fun! and we kept our production primarily in China. It's just the most reliable supply chain. When you start to move the supply chain and set up new manufacturing, there's a big learning curve, not to mention a huge cost. We also kind of bet on the fact that there will be a recognition by the administration at some point that China is a very important trading partner. Almost, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and while they can joust with each other, at the end of the day, they've got to play ball. And while we'd love to bring toy manufacturing back to the U.S., it's not really practical. We don't have the type of labor here. We don't have factories set up. We don't have the ability to finance the development of factories. So we're an industry that's generally not really going to be coming back to the United States, like some other industries might have a better opportunity to. So we've stuck it out in China, and so far it's paid off for us.

MARTÍNEZ: We mentioned back in the summer, too, that toymakers were saying that Christmas was at risk. Was that hyperbole, or is that maybe more of a reality now than ever before?

FOREMAN: Well, I mean, it was not hyperbole when, you know, tariffs were 145% and it was a de facto embargo on importations, not just from China but from other markets. You know, remember, India's tariffs are 50% right now. You know, I always say that consumers can always find products to buy. Stores will never be empty. It's all about the stuff you really want, and is that available when you want it, or are you going to get the next best item? So Christmas will come. It always comes. It will be full of a few less of the more desirable types of products, and consumers will have to, you know, be satisfied with sometimes the next or the third best thing on their list.

by A Martínez, NPR | Read more:
Image: Tonka truck/Walmart

[ed. See also: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist/Moody's Analytical (X):]

***

We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.

[ed. Solution - just lower your expectations.]

“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.

“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.

Plaques

[ed. Priceless. And always classy. Now we know how he occupies time when he isn't eating cheeseburgers, drinking diet cokes, and watching Fox News (and golfing and texting). Poor Republicans, this is your savior, see: White House installs plaques (MSN). hmm.  wonder why this country feels so divided. Also, if you want to read some truly deranged stuff, check this out (transcript) from a recent rally 12-9-25 (Sen. Dems).]

The Shadow President

On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.” [ed. See Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.]

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.” (...)

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” (...)

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. … I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

by Andy Kroll, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Image: Evan Vucci/AP Images
[ed. What a piece of work. A modern day Eichmann pushing his modern day version of Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) - the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany that placed Hitler's word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. Also Gleichschaltung the process of Nazification by which Hitler established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education. See also: The White House Is a Lost Cause (NYT):]

***

Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs... It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.

The Quiet Collapse of Surveys: Fewer Humans (and More AI Agents) Are Answering Survey Questions

Surveys are the bedrock of political polling, market research, and public policy. Want to know what voters think? Survey them. Need to price a product? Survey. Trying to understand shifts in public opinion or workplace satisfaction? You guessed it.

But there is a fundamental problem: fewer and fewer people are answering - and more and more of those who do are AI agents.

I explore these two converging trends below. Then, I’ll show that anybody (including me) can easily set-up an AI agent to earn some money with taking surveys. I’ll then estimate the impact of this further down the line in three main fields and propose some solutions.

Problem 1: The increase of non-response rates

If you use survey data, it probably hasn’t gone unnoticed: survey response rates have plummeted. In the 1970s and 1980s, response rates ranged between 30% and 50%. Today, they can be as low as 5% .

To give some (shocking) examples: the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) experienced a drop in response rates from approximately 40% to 13%, leading to instances where only five individuals responded to certain labor market survey questions. In the US, the current population survey dropped from a 90% response rate to a record low of 65%. (...)

Problem 2: The increase of AI agents

How difficult is it to build an agent? So… I did what any overcaffeinated social data nerd would do. I built a simple python pipeline for my own AI agent to take surveys for me (don’t worry I promise that I didn’t actually use it!). The pipeline I built just requires me to:

• Access to a powerful language model (I just used OpenAI’s API - but perhaps for research representativeness of the distribution an uncensored model is way better!).

• A survey parser: this can be as simple as a list of questions in a .txt file or a JSON pulled from Qualtrics or Typeform. The real pros would scrape the survey live though!

• I prompted it with a persona. The easiest is to built a mini “persona generator” that rotates between types: urban lefty, rural centrist, climate pessimist, you name it.

Overall how long did this take? Not too long at all, the most difficult and time consuming part is making it interact with the interface of the survey and tool/website.

That’s it. With a bit more effort, this could scale to dozens or hundreds of bots. Vibe coding from scratch (see my previous Substack on how to do vibe coding ) would work perfectly too.

Don’t worry btw, I didn’t deploy it on a real platform. But other people did. Below, I extrapolated the trends of AI agents based on data points in existing research since data is very hard to find...

Downstream problems

Let’s explore how this impacts three main fields in which surveys are used: political polls, market research and public policy.

Political polls. Many polls depend heavily on post-stratification weighting to correct for underrepresentation in key demographic groups. But when response rates fall and LLM answers increase, the core assumptions behind these corrections collapse. For instance, turn-out models become unstable: if synthetic agents overrepresent politically “typical” speech (e.g., centrist or non-committal), models overfit the middle and underpredict edges. Similarly, calibration failures increase: AI-generated responses often mirror majority-opinion trends scraped from high-volume internet sources (like Reddit or Twitter), not the minority voter. This results in high-confidence and stable predictions that are systematically biased.

Market research. AI-generated responses are, by design, probabilistic aggregations of likely human language conditioned on previous examples. That’s great for fluency and coherence, but not good for capturing edge-case consumer behavior. Real customer data is heteroskedastic and noisy: people contradict themselves, change preferences, or click randomly. AI, in contrast, minimises entropy. Synthetic consumers will never hate a product irrationally, misunderstand your user interface, or misinterpret your branding. This results in product teams building for a latent mean user, resulting in poor performance across actual market segments, particularly underserved or hard-to-model populations.

Public policy. Governments often rely on survey data to estimate local needs and allocate resources: think of labor force participation surveys, housing needs assessments, or vaccine uptake intention polls. When the data is LLM generated this can result in vulnerable populations becoming statistically invisible and lead to underprovision of services in areas with the greatest need. Even worse, AI-generated answers may introduce feedback loops: as agencies “validate” demand based on polluted data, their future sampling and resource targeting become increasingly skewed.

So what can we actually do about this?

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (believe me - if there were, my start-up dream would be reality and I’d already have a VC pitch deck and a logo). But here are a few underdeveloped but in my humble opinion promising ideas:

by Lauren Leek, Lauren's Data Substack |  Read more:

Image: Lauren Leek compilation of sources

[ed. I never answer surveys because, why assist people in figuring out new and innovative ways to manipulate and sell me things (including politicans)? So, I'm not surprised this tool is tanking. What is surprising is the claim that AI bots are a significant reason. I guess if you're a professional survey taker and have the coding skills then yeah, it would make sense to automate the process (more surveys, more money). But really, how many people can do that? More than anything, I'm surprised that prediction markets aren't mentioned here. Those seem to be the most accurate and granular tools for achieving the same purpose these days.]

The Trump Mind-Set Is Not Complex

[ed. Actions speak louder than words.]

Peering into the Trump mind-set — the logic underpinning his priorities, his morality, his decision making — is like opening up a garbage pail left out for days during a summer heat wave.  [ed. An opening line for the ages.]

The dominant theme is governing by narcissism: Make Trump Great Again.

President Trump can be persuaded with money, the purchase of his crypto coins, contributions and sometimes with plain old obsequious flattery.

The two shining lights that guide his notion of morality are his self-interest and the enhancement of his self-image, both of which crowd out consideration of the national interest and the public welfare.

The strongest example: his refusal to accept the humiliation of defeat in the 2020 election, resulting in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by his followers determined to “stop the steal,” and Trump’s subsequent pardoning of the insurrectionists.

He is blind to the harms, up to and including death, that he and his policies have inflicted here and abroad. The notion that his actions have worsened the economy is, to Trump, intolerable. Asked by Politico to rate his handling of the economy, Trump replied, “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Trump relishes his hatreds. Revenge brings him joy. “I hate my opponent,” Trump told mourners for Charlie Kirk at a memorial service in Phoenix, with a tone of relish. “I don’t want what’s best for them.”

The profit motive — for himself, for his allies and for his donors — dominates Trump’s decision making across the gamut, from his pardons of convicted criminals to negotiation strategies with foreign leaders to the formulation of tax legislation.

Trump lacks a basic sense of fairness, exemplified by his disregard of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, and he feels no obligation to honor alliances designed to protect democratic states.

The key measure Trump uses in defining justice, on the one hand, is whether an individual, group, corporation or country supports him (the Jan. 6 insurrectionists), contributes to his wealth (crypto) or elevates his stature (Vladimir Putin’s praise.) On the other hand, he condemns and calls for criminal prosecutions of all those who challenged the legality of what he has done or suggested anything untoward about his relations with Russia.

Trump does not think strategically. Instead, his compulsive need to be a winner, to have his ego or bank account rewarded, precludes anything but short-term tactical calculations shaped by the pursuit of his self-interest.

To quote a once-famous Washington sportscaster, Warner Wolf, “Let’s go to the videotape”:

On Nov. 4, a delegation of Swiss industrialists gave Trump a high-end Rolex desktop clock and a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) gold bar worth $130,000 inscribed 45 and 47. Ten days later, the Trump administration agreed to cut the 39 percent tariff on Swiss imports to 15 percent.

The initial 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, drawn by Russia and the United States, makes no mention of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, providing instead for Russian retention of land it now controls. The 28 points do provide for substantial American business investment in the region and the end of sanctions against Russia.

In a key article, “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine,” the Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson wrote that the architects of the plan were “charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, posted a denunciation of the plan on X on Dec. 8:

It’s being described as a peace plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine, but if you look at the details, it has nothing to do with peace. It is a business deal to make the people around Donald Trump rich. It’s just corruption, through and through.

Rich Trump donors, Murphy continued,

are right now trying to get in on the action. One donor just recently paid hundreds of 1000s of dollars to a lobbyist that’s really close to Trump’s inner circle to try to buy the Nord Stream two pipeline that’s a Russian gas pipeline, once again, something that is only possible for these investors to get rich on if the war is over and the US lifts its sanctions. Another close Trump associate is in talks about acquiring a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.

What does Ukraine get? Murphy asks and answers:

Nothing, nothing. This deal sells out Ukraine. In fact, this deal would require Ukraine to give to Russia territory that Russia doesn’t even currently control. It provides amnesty for all of the war crimes that Putin has committed...

Trump’s transactional mind-set translates into a zero-sum mentality driving his trade and tariffs wars, based on his conviction that other countries are ripping off the United States, causing, in turn, self-inflicted damage through inflationary pressures and strained relations with allies and adversaries alike.

I asked Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively on the rise and fall of constitutional government, to step back and describe the Trump administration. She replied by email:

Many autocrats have used their positions for self-enrichment — Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Modi and more. But none have raised this possibility for self-enrichment to the heights we have seen here in the U.S., in less than one year of Trump. Economists have called their governments predatory states because instead of providing services, these governments use public wealth for private benefit.

In the forward to a book about Hungary, “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” Scheppele wrote about the regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, but she said in her email that her comments apply equally well, if not more so, to the Trump presidency:

When a mafia-like organization goes from underworld to upperworld and controls the state itself, the resulting mafia state takes its newly acquired tools of governance and deploys them with the principles of a mafia — holding its own loyalists in line with rigorously enforced rules of discipline while benefiting them with the spoils of power, and threatening its enemies with criminal prosecutions, libel cases, tax audits, confiscation of property, denial of employment, surveillance and even veiled threats of violence.

Mafias also have another quality: They do not operate through formal rules, bureaucratic structures and transparent procedures. Because mafias have the mentality of criminal organizations, even when they are part of the upperworld, they are accustomed to making their crucial decisions in the shadows. Like in families on which they are modeled, the political relatives in mafias are rewarded for loyalty, not merit, and divorces occur on grounds of disloyalty rather than bad performance. The distribution of available resources within the family rewards solidarity and punishes improvisational deviation. It is precisely not based on law.

Along complementary lines, Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of authoritarian politics, replied by email to my inquiries:

We know that strongman rule — where power is concentrated in the leadership — is associated with greater corruption. Examples from Viktor Orban in Hungary and Alberto Fujimori in Peru illustrate this well. The more power grows concentrated, the more that we see the leader, their close friends and family and loyal business elites profit.

We are observing this play out in the U.S. context, where Trump and those in his entourage are growing richer through a range of activities, from cryptocurrency to real estate deals in the Middle East.

At the extreme, Frantz continued, “this becomes a kleptocratic system.” (...)

While I agree in the main with Scheppele and Frantz, I think that in key respects Trump stands apart from Putin, Narendra Modi, Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, distinctions that get lost when they are lumped together under such categories as the rulers of mafia states or nascent kleptocracies.

The most important characteristic separating the four foreign autocrats from Trump is that they think in the long term, calculating the broad implications of their decisions, while Trump’s thinking is short term, if not childlike.

Jonathan Martin, a senior political reporter for Politico, described this Trump characteristic well in his Dec. 4 essay, “The President Who Never Grew Up”:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-”Big,” ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

Trump is one part Orban, Martin wrote,

making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions. But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or Trapper keepers.

Yet, as with all children, there are also outbursts in the middle of restaurants. Or in this case, the Cabinet Room.

Trump’s petulance is one of the reasons Putin, armed with the discipline of a former lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., runs rings around our president. At the same time, Trump’s childishness underpins his submissive adoration of his Russian counterpart.

Finally, in an administration known for its erratic adoption and sudden abandonment of policies, Trump has demonstrated an unwavering determination to enhance the fortunes of the rich while doing little or nothing to ameliorate worsening conditions for the working-class MAGA electorate that helped bring him to power.

I wrote about this before, but the MAGA electorate stands out from other political constituencies in its disproportionate share of lower-middle-income and middle-income voters, whose families make from $30,000 to $100,000 a year.

When the effects of the “big, beautiful” domestic policy act — tax cuts and reduced spending on health care and food stamps — are combined with the effects of Trump’s tariffs, these moderate to middle-income voters come out behind.

The Yale Budget Lab calculated that virtually everyone in the $30,000 to $100,000 range would come out a net loser. Households making $75,730, roughly the middle of that range, would lose, on average, $1,060 this year...

The gains, however, are tilted heavily toward the very rich, who hold a majority of the equities. Gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution do not exceed $8,000 for any decile. For those in the sixth through ninth deciles, gains range from roughly $10,750 to $51,000. In the top decile, the gain balloons to just under $280,000.

The more than quarter-million dollars going to families in the top decile is, however, chump change compared with how well Trump and his family made out during the first months of his second term.

On Oct. 16, Cryptonews reported that “the family of U.S. President Donald Trump has generated pretax gains of around $1 billion in the past year from their diverse array of crypto-related ventures, a new investigation reveals.”

In the meantime, the Trump family’s search for ways to profit continues unabated, with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, taking the lead in the most recent ventures.

On Dec. 11, The New York Post reported that Kushner had initiated talks with Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management and Henry Kravis’s KKR “to assist with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine.”

At the same time, Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has put money up in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, joining the sovereign wealth firms for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

For Trump and his family, there is no separation of holding government office and making money.

by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Stier for The New York Times. Source photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
[ed. I'm still in denial that this country elected this guy not just once, but twice. As George W. Bush famously said "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” ... or, whatever. But I'm actually a little hopeful these days, with a feeling that things are reorienting, new alliances being formed, new scenarios being gamed out, new calculations. Politicos smell blood in the water like sharks. Also, people don't like losing (or being on a losing team). As players and coaches in the professional and college football ranks will tell you - support can evaporate in an instant when fans decide they've given you enough of a chance. Everyone has a ' let's try something different' threshold. We'll see where it is for Trump supporters. See also: Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions (NYT:]

***

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.

***

[ed. And, as they say - there's more! From one the few token conservatives on the staff of the NY Times, see: Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief:]

Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick. (...)

To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. (...)

Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized. (...)

This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.

Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right

By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.

Ever since she’d pulled me out of school, she had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blonde of its baby color. After reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.

She had me crawl whenever I was at home, which was most of the time. Mom home schooled me between fourth and eighth grades, and even today, as a parent who has come to see plainly how damaging those years were, I know that she believed that her choice was in my best interest.

It was the lack of state oversight or standards that allowed our situation. It was the laws that failed me. Today, as home-schooling numbers continue to surge, similar laws fail to protect millions of kids.

Mom called what we did “unschooling,” a concept championed by the home-schooling pioneer John Holt. She agreed with his assertion that “schools are bad places for kids,” or at least for a certain kind of kid; my brother Aaron, she decided, was better suited for public school and was sent off on the bus each morning.

I, on the other hand, was a “creative global learner,” and Mom said that she was going to give me a “free-form education” in order to “pursue passions.” Other than math, which I began to do by correspondence course, I mostly spent my days with her visiting shops, libraries and restaurants of our rapidly-growing suburb, or else having “project time” — drawing superheroes, rereading my David Macaulay and Roald Dahl books, or writing short stories by the pool as Mom reapplied my hair bleach.

Mom had been going through a hard time — ever since we’d moved to Plano, Texas, her social life was dim, her career as a children’s magazine editor had been put on hiatus, and her own mother had begun a long decline into dementia — but my presence by her side seemed to lift her spirits. “You are better than any grown-up, Stef. You are more than all I need,” she told me.

I felt proud to help her, but silently I worried. The longer I spent at home with her (Dad was at work five days a week), the more impossible it seemed that I might ever go back into the world. I knew how badly my return to school would hurt her, and increasingly school seemed to me a terrifying place. I’d mostly lost my friendships from my old school, and my few attempts to re-enter the land of other kids had been failures; after just a day or two at a Boy Scout camp, I’d actively tried to contract conjunctivitis so that I could be sent home early.

Sometimes, flipping through one of my brother’s old textbooks, I’d see how far behind I’d already fallen. But who could I speak with about any of that?

As the years passed, my isolation deepened. My mom needed to take on part-time work, so now I largely spent my afternoons alone in my room, where there was no one to witness the long AOL Instant Messenger romance I carried on with a supposed teenage girl, who in fact turned out to be an older sexual predator. No one noticed the track of scars I’d been making on my hip with the tip of a compass. No one saw how I’d spend countless hours alone in my room with a portable TV inches from my face, wanting to disappear into the worlds onscreen.

Not once, in the four and a half years I spent at home, did anyone from the state come to assess what sort of education I was receiving, or even just to check on me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view. For much of the 20th century, the law was essentially silent with regard to home-schooling. The 1972 Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder granted Amish parents the right to withdraw their children from school after eighth grade due to unique religious beliefs and practices, but the U.S. Supreme Court has never specifically addressed a constitutional right to home-schooling in general.

In the absence of any federal law or Supreme Court decision, home-schooling regulation was left to the states. In large part driven by fundamentalist Christian lobby groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association (H.S.L.D.A.), home-schooling had become formally legalized in nearly every state by the time Mom pulled me out of school in the 1990s. Over the following three decades, H.S.L.D.A. and an associated network of smaller organizations have been staggeringly successful in furthering their anti-regulation agenda and quashing dissent. Current home-school laws still differ by state, but in nearly all states the lack of oversight beggars belief.

In 48 states, registered sex offenders and adults with a conviction of crimes against minors can still home-school a child, effectively removing the child from the observation of other adults and peers, even if that child’s safety is under active investigation by child protective services. In 12 states (including Texas), parents aren’t required to submit any documentation to home-school. They can simply remove a child from school, and then they will no longer be subject to any mandatory state assessments or contact with officials. In another 17 states, families are required only to provide notice to the state of their intention to home-school, but they too face no state-mandated assessments.

In 19 of the 21 remaining states that do have laws requiring assessments of home-schooled children, the laws are not enforced in all home-schooling situations. In 49 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have their children screened for medical issues or ensure that they receive care. In 40 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have a high school diploma.

As the number of home-schoolers has surged — around half a million when I was a kid, driven to around 3.5 million since the pandemic — the country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots, where the fate of home-schooled children has been left almost entirely to their parents. States continue to allow parents to operate with little or no oversight, resigning the fates of millions of kids to the assumption that parents know best, even if evidence abounds that this is not always the case...

Legal definitions of abuse vary, but the choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive. I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to limit a child’s access to learning materials, or to indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives, or to willingly limit a child’s ability to function in a larger society.

Each home-school is different, and of course most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children. Indeed, for many parents, the choice to home-school is about prioritizing a child’s safety and better meeting a child’s special learning needs.

But what home-schooling experiences — good or bad — have in common is that they remove what schools provide: a place where children learn and are with one another, a place where adults outside the home interact with children and can intervene on a child’s behalf, and also a transparent, public minimum standard of education. (...)

In my research, I met a 45-year-old woman who was home-schooled in Mississippi in the late 1980s and 1990s, and her experience resembles a woefully familiar pattern. When she was in second grade, she says, her parents found a simple way of avoiding the questions that her teachers might ask if they saw the bruises on her body: They simply removed her and her siblings from that school and so from the gaze of concerned adults. She says that once she and her siblings were behind the legal veil of home-schooling, their parents continued to beat them, locked away any educational materials in the house, and forced the children to spend their days doing chores on the property.

Those who oppose regulation claim that such cases are rare, and they rightfully argue that educational neglect and abuse happen at school as well. But we’ve created a system in which it’s impossible to know how common home-schooling abuse might actually be. Because home-schoolers in many states are not even required to officially register, proper data collection can be nearly impossible, and children who exist under the sovereign power of a home-schooling parent face enormous risks by speaking out.

Those in favor of home-schooling also point to a multitude of home-school successes under current laws, and certainly there are a great many. I agree with the pro-home-school lobby that the close attention of parent-educators and the student-interest-led learning model can teach children how to learn in creative and uncommon ways.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that this same lobby fights so fiercely to keep these children from even minimal oversight. Indeed, it would seem that these parents would invite outside assessments to demonstrate the success of their approach. At the very least, it’s hard to understand why home-schooling parents would not warmly welcome routine checks of health and wellness, in order to protect those children whose parents misuse home-schooling to abuse and isolate their children.

My father and brother, reading my account of those years, tell me that they recognize the episodes I describe, but that even they — the closest observers of that time — did not know how alone and often lost I felt while they were at work and school, or how desperately I wished someone would put an end to the situation. “I just assumed your mom knew what was best,” Dad says. 

by Stefan Merrill Block, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos

[ed. Boggles the mind. We have truancy laws for school attendance but no oversight or standardized testing for home-schooling?]

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

Billionaires had a great thing going. The ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, among others, invited the super rich to exert all the influence on policy and politics that their money could buy — and then enjoy all the wealth that influence secured for them in return. Thanks to ever-more-obliging tax policies, the billionaire class grew absurdly rich over the years that followed. In the last five years alone, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion, Forbes reported.

And they did it in many cases without the rest of us even having a clue. It took the investigative reporter Jane Mayer five years of relentless digging to figure out how the Koch brothers gained a chokehold on the Republican Party. The title of her 2016 book, “Dark Money,” became synonymous with a particularly effective form of influence that was all but untraceable. The billionaires could have kept on like that forever. All they had to do was keep their mouths closed.

Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

Elon Musk bragged about his support for President Trump, to whose campaign and allied groups he donated more than $250 million. He loudly attempted to buy votes in Pennsylvania. Then he leveraged it all into a cruel and chaotic effort to dismantle federal agencies. Marc Andreessen’s tech-heavy venture capital firm publicly pledged $100 million to target lawmakers who attempt to regulate artificial intelligence; Mr. Andreessen then mocked the pope for suggesting some ethical guardrails around the technology. Bill Ackman announced that he and his pals were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and urged Mr. Trump to call in the National Guard if that effort failed and Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty met his worst expectations.

And all the while they’re out there lecturing us about their fitness routines, their weird personal philosophies, their conspicuous consumption and more. Jeff Bezos staged a three-day, celebrity-packed, $50 million wedding to Lauren Sánchez, the whole cringe affair optimized for global paparazzi interest. Mr. Ackman is advising young men to try the line, “May I meet you?”, a strategy that in his own experience, he says, “almost never got a no.” Owning the world isn’t enough for these people; they must also go in search of the cheap high of influencer culture.

But no amount of auramaxxing can hide the new reality. Just six years ago, 69 percent of respondents to a Cato Institute poll agreed that billionaires “earned their wealth by creating value for others.” An only slightly smaller majority agreed with the statement “we are all better off when people get rich.” Today, one poll after another shows that Americans want the rich to be taxed at higher, even much higher rates. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have attracted an increasingly large national following with an anti-billionaire message that previously would have sounded extremist. And New York City, the richest metropolis in the nation, just elected a democratic socialist who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist at all.

The billionaires have only themselves to blame.

It’s as if the sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy. Peter Thiel, the crucial funder of JD Vance’s ascent, talks extensively about his desire to escape democracy (and politics generally) in favor of some kind of bizarre techno-libertarian future. Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and former crypto exec, calls for tech elites to take control of cities and states — or build their own — and run them as quasi-private entities. Alex Karp, who along with Thiel founded the high-flying military intelligence company Palantir, shares his predictions about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, pausing to brag, “I think I’m the highest-ranked tai chi practitioner in the business world.” In another era, this would all be laughable. But as the MAGA moment emboldens them to drop any pretense of civic virtue and just go full will-to-power, their nutty ideas are now borderline plausible. And terrifying.

Billionaires control the cable channels, social media platforms, newspapers, movie studios and essentially everything else that we consume, but for their own information sources they are in some cases more likely to trust their own kind. Semafor documented one ultraexclusive group chat that included Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Srinivasan, among others, in which the self-reinforcing discourse is reported to have pushed many Silicon Valley tycoons toward right-wing politics. “If you weren’t in the business at all,” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams said of a similar group chat he was a member of, “you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently.”

Such disconnection goes a long way to explaining why billionaires can’t grasp how the real world is convulsing outside their well-secured gates.

And convulsing it is. According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.

A realignment may be underway. The recent push for the Epstein files, a previously unimaginable collaboration between conspiracy-addled MAGA true believers and anti-corporatist Democrats, was just the latest sign. At a moment when income inequality, the looming threat of A.I. and the rise of authoritarianism seem to be straining American societal cohesion, a revolt against self-dealing elites may be the only cause compelling enough to bring us together. (...)

The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms. OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not quite Voltaire. But there was a pedophilia scandal involving Louis XV: Public obsession with the king’s many mistresses helped give rise to so-called libelles, cheaply printed, semi-factual pamphlets that speculated on, among other matters, the king’s supposed never-ending supply of teenage girls. It would have fit right in on TikTok. Reverence turned to mockery; mockery begot contempt; and then …

That story did not end well.

by Michael Hirschorn, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

[ed. Actually, it did end well, just not for the rich. Think about it, the sheer scale of 2900 people owning over One Thousand MILLION dollars apiece ($16 trillion total) - not $100 MILLION, or even $500 MILLLION - (Larry Ellison has $274 thousand MILLIONS alone). It's like saying "Ok, we're taking over the world and the other 99 percent of you have to go live in Australia."]

Federal Government Blocks State AI Regulation

President Trump issued an executive order yesterday attempting to thwart state AI laws, saying that federal agencies must fight state laws because Congress hasn’t yet implemented a national AI standard. Trump’s executive order tells the Justice Department, Commerce Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies to take a variety of actions.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones. The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order… Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation,” Trump’s order said. The order claims that state laws, such as one passed in Colorado, “are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.”

Congressional Republicans recently decided not to include a Trump-backed plan to block state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), although it could be included in other legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also failed to get congressional backing for legislation that would punish states with AI laws.

“After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump,” US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said yesterday. “With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet.”

Markey said that “a broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said the “executive order’s overly broad preemption threatens states with lawsuits and funding cuts for protecting their residents from AI-powered frauds, scams, and deepfakes.”

Trump orders Bondi to sue states

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said that “preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is absurd and dangerous. Congress has a responsibility to get this technology right—and quickly—but states must be allowed to act in the public interest in the meantime. I’ll be working with my colleagues to introduce a full repeal of this order in the coming days.”

The Trump order includes a variation on Cruz’s proposal to prevent states with AI laws from accessing broadband grant funds. The executive order also includes a plan that Trump recently floated to have the federal government file lawsuits against states with AI laws.

Within 30 days of yesterday’s order, US Attorney General Pam Bondi is required to create an AI Litigation Task Force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 2 of this order, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”...

It would be up to Congress to decide whether to pass the proposed legislation. But the various other components of the executive order could dissuade states from implementing AI laws even if Congress takes no action.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Kamikaze pilot WWII via:

[ed. Umm... state's rights? Whatever. The main intent of course is to do nothing, allowing AI to progress without any external oversight or regulation. This decision will go to court, lose, be appealed, lose, and then a couple years later get dumped on the Supreme Court - pretty much the same game plan we've seen over and over again on other issues. In the mean time, AI models will become so dangerous (and imbedded) that even if the Supreme Court renders a negative ruling it'll be too late.]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

Populism Fast and Slow

It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon. Such a person is likely to be disappointed. It does not take much reading to discover that political scientists are quite conflicted. (One might take this review article to provide a decent snapshot of the relatively large academic literature on the subject.) There is a modest level of agreement about what populism is, but the most widely accepted definition is both superficial and misleading. That is inauspicious, as far as combating the forces of populism is concerned.

Most importantly, academics have not done a great job confronting the most confounding aspect of populism, which is that the more it gets criticized by intellectuals, the more powerful it becomes. As a result, most of us are still playing the same old game, with the same old strategies, without realizing that the metagame has changed.

It is not difficult to see where the academic discussion went wrong. An unfortunately large number of writers on populism were wrongfooted by the decision, made early on, to treat populism as a type of political ideology, along the lines of socialism or liberalism. This gave rise to an immediate puzzle, because populism seems to be compatible with a large number of other conventional political ideologies. In particular, it comes in both left-wing (e.g. Chavez) and right-wing (e.g. Bolsonaro) variants. So if populism is a political ideology, it’s a strange sort of ideology, because it doesn’t seem to exclude other views in the way that a conventional ideology does.

The most obvious alternative is to treat it as a strategy, used to gain specific advantage in a democratic electoral system. This is a more promising approach, but it also generates its own puzzles. If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? And if it’s just an electoral strategy, why do populists rule the way they do? For example, why are they so keen on undermining the rule of law (leading to conflict with the courts, attempts to limit judicial independence, etc.)?

The solution that many people have settled on is to accept a watered-down version of the first view, treating populism as an ideology, but only a “thin” one. The most commonly cited definition is from Cas Mudde:

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

The major problem with this definition stems from the fact that it needs to be so minimal, in order to accommodate the fact that populism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours, but as a result it is simply too minimal to explain many of the specific features of populist movements. For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)? Furthermore, reading the definition, it would seem as though the left should be able to get significant mileage out of populism, and yet throughout Europe the rise of populism has almost uniformly benefited the right.

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production. More specifically, it is a consequence of the distinction between what Daniel Kahneman referred to as “fast and slow” thinking. (...)

Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

This reservoir of discontent creates the opportunity that is exploited by populist politicians. Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites, and around institutions dominated by elites (e.g. traditional political parties), in order to tap into this fund of resentment, positioning oneself as the champion of the people. What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.

Seen from this perspective, it is not difficult to see why populism can be an effective political strategy, and why it has become dramatically more effective in the age of social media. As one can tell from the title of Kahneman’s book, a central feature of intuitive cognition is that it is “fast,” while analytical reasoning is “slow.” This means that an acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.

Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

This analysis explains why populism, despite being a mere strategy, also winds up having a characteristic ideological tone and content. The key is to see it as a political strategy that privileges a particular style of cognition. (...)

This privileging of intuitive (or System 1) cognition generates a set of diverse features that can be found in most populist movements. What follows is a non-exhaustive list:

1. Frustration with elites on specific issues. Crime is an ongoing source of frustration, in part because elites – even those who declare themselves “tough on crime” – believe that punishment should be imposed within a legal framework. This creates an opening for populist politicians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who empowered the police to carry out summary executions, and Donald Trump in the U.S. who explicitly authorized a return to “street justice” by urban police forces, and has used the U.S. military to carry out summary executions (so far only in international waters). (...)

2. Collective action problems. Populists have never met a collective action problem that they did not feel inclined to make worse (e.g. climate change). That’s because, whenever something bad happens, there is an impulse to blame some other person, but in a collective action problem, the bad effects that you suffer genuinely are the fault of the other person! The catch is that the situation is symmetric — the bad effects they are suffering are your fault. Getting out of the situation therefore requires the cognitive insight that you must both stop, and that you must refrain from free-riding despite the incentives. Intuition, on the other hand, suggests that the correct response is to punish the other person, and since the best way to do this is typically by defecting, the intuitive response is just a formula for transforming a collective action problem into a race to the bottom. This is why civilizations collapse into barbarism and not the other way around.

3. Communication style. A very prominent feature of populist politicians is their speaking style, which has an unscripted, stream-of-consciousness quality (e.g. see Hugo Chavez’s Aló Presidente TV show, which one could also, totally imagine Trump doing). This is important precisely because it is the opposite of the self-controlled, calculated speaking style favored by mainstream politicians (which the French have the perfect term for: langue de bois). This is why populist politicians are perceived, by a large segment of the population, as being more “honest,” even when everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which it is said. Often this is because they themselves employ the controlled speaking style, and so are not bothered by others using it. And yet it is perfectly clear, when listening to Donald Trump, that what he is saying is exactly what he is thinking. Indeed, he obviously lacks the verbal self-inhibition required to speak in any other way. This is what leads people to trust him – especially if they are relying on intuitive cues, rather than analytic evaluation, to determine trustworthiness. (The use of vulgarity is another common tactic of populist politicians, to demonstrate their lack of verbal inhibition. Traditional politicians sometimes try to imitate this, without success, because they fail to realize that it is not the vulgarity, but rather the disinhibition, that achieves the important communicative effect.)

4. Illiberalism. Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.” (...)

5. Conspiracy theory. Many people have wondered why populists are so drawn to conspiracy theories, or “conspiracist” thinking. Again, this is a straightforward consequence of the privileging of intuitive thought. The natural bias of the human mind is toward belief in conspiracy theories, through a combination of apophenia, hyperactive agency-detection, and confirmation bias. Rational suspicion is achieved through the subsequent imposition of explicit test procedures, designed to eliminate false positives. In other words, it requires active suppression of conspiracist thoughts. To the extent that populists reject the style of cognition involved in that override, they open themselves up to a variety of irrational thought-patterns. When criticized by elites, many are inclined to double down on the conspiracism, because the cognitive style being pressed upon them is precisely what they hate most about elites.

by Joseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: Philip Lorca di-Corsica

[ed. See also: The prospects for left-wing populism (IDC):]

***

The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. (...)

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)

The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.